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Savoy Cakes
Take one pound of fine sifted sugar, add the yolks of ten eggs--keeping the whites in a separate pan--and set the eggs and sugar, if in summer, in cold water; if there is any ice, set the pan upon it, as it will enable the eggs to be beaten finer; then beat the yolks and sugar well with a wooden spoon for twenty minutes, and put in the grated rind of a lemon. Beat up the whites with a whisk until they become quite stiff and white as snow. Stir them into the batter by degrees, then add three-quarters of a pound of well-dried flour. Put all in a mould in a slack oven to bake.
A pure sponge in the old sense: no chemical leavening, no fat, no liquid beyond the eggs. Everything depends on air beaten into the yolks and whites, so the folding and the low oven are where the cake is won or lost.
- The hinge: fold, do not stir"Stir them into the batter by degrees" is best read as folding in thirds with a spatula or large spoon, cutting down and lifting over. The air beaten into the yolks and the whites is the only lift the cake has; beat it out and it bakes to a dense slab.
- Slack ovenA slack oven is usually reckoned at somewhere around 300F (150C), and may well have been cooler. At that heat a cake of this size in a deep mould is likely to want roughly 45-60 minutes. It is done when it springs back and a skewer comes out clean; a sponge with no fat dries out fast past that point.
- Quantities in modern termsOne pound of sugar is about 2 1/4 cups caster or superfine; 3/4 lb flour is about 2 3/4 cups sifted. Ten Victorian yolks are roughly nine to ten modern large yolks, and the whites of the same eggs go back in.
- "Well-dried flour"Flour was commonly dried before the fire to drive off moisture picked up in storage. Modern bagged flour needs nothing but sifting, twice, to keep it light enough to fold in without knocking out air.
- Beating the yolksTwenty minutes with a wooden spoon is roughly five to seven minutes in a stand mixer on high, until the mixture is pale, thick and falls in a ribbon. The recipe sets the eggs and sugar over cold water or ice in summer because, it says, this "will enable the eggs to be beaten finer"; in a temperature-controlled kitchen it is largely unnecessary.
- The mouldTraditionally a fluted or turban-shaped Savoy mould; a 9-10 inch tube or Bundt pan is the closest modern equivalent. Butter it thoroughly and dust with caster sugar rather than flour, which gives the crisp sugary crust the cake is known for.
- Whites, stiff but not dryStop at firm peaks that still look glossy. Whites beaten past that break into grains and will not fold in evenly, leaving white streaks and coarse holes.
- Yield and servingAbout 12 servings. It is deliberately plain and dry-textured, meant to be eaten with fruit, cream, or a glass of sweet wine, and it stales within a day or two.
The Savoy cake is the English name for the French biscuit de Savoie, one of the whisked sponge family that also produced the Genoese and the ladyfinger. Tradition traces it to the court of the Counts of Savoy in the fourteenth century, a story generally repeated in French pastry literature but not documented in any contemporary source; by the eighteenth century the cake was a standard of French confectionery, baked in tall fluted moulds so it emerged as an ornamental turban or crown. It demonstrates the logic of egg-raised baking before baking powder became commonplace: the only leavening is mechanical, beaten in by hand over the better part of an hour, and the slack oven exists to set that foam gently rather than to drive it up.